Bendigo's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Gold Rush City Stacks Up Against Its Global Peers

Bendigo's major collecting institutions are quietly confronting a problem that sounds mundane but carries real costs: thousands of duplicate digital images sitting inside collection management systems, eating storage, muddying search results and creating conservation headaches for staff already stretched across multiple sites. The Bendigo Art Gallery on View Street and Bendigo Regional Archives Centre on Hargreaves Street have both flagged the issue internally as part of broader digitisation reviews underway across 2025 and into this year.

The timing matters. Across Victoria, the state government's Public Record Office Victoria has been pushing regional councils and collecting bodies to lift digital asset standards ahead of a compliance benchmark it set for mid-2026. That pressure, combined with the rapid growth of born-digital collections and legacy scanning backlogs accumulated during COVID-era remote work periods, has left many institutions holding duplicate image files numbering in the tens of thousands — sometimes with minor resolution or metadata differences that make automated deduplication unreliable.

What Bendigo Is Actually Doing About It

At the Bendigo Art Gallery, staff have been working through a phased audit of its digitised collection, which spans more than 6,500 works. The gallery's approach has centred on manual curatorial review for high-value holdings, combined with perceptual hashing software — tools that compare images by visual fingerprint rather than file name — for the bulk of the photographic and print collection. The process is labour-intensive. A single collection category can take several weeks to clear when curatorial staff balance it against exhibition and loan commitments.

La Trobe University's Bendigo campus, which anchors a significant portion of local professional employment in the education and research sectors, has a stake in this too. The university's broader digital library infrastructure, shared across campuses, has been subject to an institution-wide deduplication project since early 2025, targeting research image repositories and teaching resource libraries. Regional campus administrators have noted the particular complexity of images that exist in multiple legitimate versions — a photograph of a Dja Dja Wurrung cultural site, for instance, may exist in a restricted-access version and a public-facing version, and automated tools cannot always distinguish intent from error.

Aboriginal cultural heritage material adds a distinct layer of sensitivity. The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation, which holds recognised rights across much of the Bendigo region, has advocated for human oversight in any automated culling of Indigenous cultural images held by third-party institutions. The concern is straightforward: an algorithm cannot assess cultural protocols around restricted imagery.

How Bendigo's Approach Compares Internationally

Cities with comparable heritage profiles — Ghent in Belgium, Hobart in Tasmania, and Oaxaca in Mexico are three frequently cited reference points in museum informatics literature — have taken markedly different paths. Ghent's municipal museums completed a system-wide deduplication program in 2023 using a centralised metadata authority, a model that worked partly because Belgium's museum sector had invested heavily in shared infrastructure through the Flemish Art Collection network. Hobart's Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery tackled the problem institution by institution rather than sector-wide, a slower approach but one that preserved local curatorial decision-making. Oaxaca's experience is instructive for different reasons: a 2022 digitisation grant from a UNESCO-affiliated program accelerated scanning but created a duplicate backlog that local archivists are still working through.

Bendigo sits somewhere between the Hobart and Ghent models — institution-led rather than sector-coordinated, but with a growing awareness that the current patchwork approach has limits. The City of Greater Bendigo, which funds both the Bendigo Art Gallery and regional archives services, has not yet announced a unified digital asset policy covering multiple institutions simultaneously.

For residents and researchers, the practical advice is to flag duplicate or conflicting image records directly with the relevant institution when they encounter them. The Bendigo Art Gallery accepts collection feedback through its website, and Bendigo Regional Archives has a public inquiry service operating Tuesday through Friday from its Hargreaves Street premises. Both institutions have said they treat external reports as useful audit inputs — and given the scale of the backlog, they mean it.